Woman Testifies She Tried to Revive Her Dying Son

Gigi Jordan on the witness stand on Wednesday.CreditPool photo by Steven Hirsch

A wealthy woman accused of killing her son in a luxury Manhattan hotel testified on Thursday that she had a change of heart as he lay dying from a drug overdose, and frantically tried to revive him.

In her second day of testimony, the woman, Gigi Jordan, also claimed her 8-year-old son, who spoke few words, had told her in written messages that he would rather die than live with his biological father. She said that he urged her to go through with a murder-suicide.

“I need to be dead. I need a lot of drugs to die peacefully. That’s all,” Ms. Jordan said, tearfully reading what she said was a written dialogue between herself and her son, Jude Mirra. Later, she said he wrote: “We are going to die anyway. Let’s do it ourselves.”

“Did you make this up and write it yourself?” asked Justice Charles H. Solomon of State Supreme Court.

“No,” she replied.

During hours of sometimes clinical and sometimes emotional testimony in the Manhattan courtroom, Ms. Jordan laid out for jurors an extraordinary set of circumstances that, she said, led her to decide to kill herself and her child in a room at the Peninsula Hotel, on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street, in early February 2010.

Ms. Jordan’s lawyer, Allan Brenner, has been laying the groundwork to argue she was in the throes of an extreme emotional disturbance when she killed her son. Under state law, a jury could then convict her of manslaughter instead of murder, lessening her sentence.

Ms. Jordan, a former nurse who made millions of dollars with companies that provide intravenous drugs to people in their homes, testified that just days before she killed her son, she had received death threats from her first husband and business partner, Raymond A. Mirra.

She said the threats came in telephone calls after she discovered that Mr. Mirra had forged documents and had stolen millions of dollars from joint bank accounts, she said. “He said, ‘This is the end, this is over, trust me, you are a dead woman,’ ” she testified.

Mr. Mirra has denied the allegations, and has filed a libel suit against Ms. Jordan.

Ms. Jordan said she was also convinced that Jude would end up in the custody of his biological father, a man she believed had sexually abused the boy. “I didn’t see any way out of this situation,” she said.

After checking into the Peninsula on Feb. 3, she said, she gave Jude large doses of Ambien and Xanax, letting him swallow the pills himself, and then crushed up large opioid painkillers, mixing them with vodka and juice and giving them to him with a syringe.

Hours later, Ms. Jordan said, she was at a desk writing a long suicide letter when she heard her son begin to breathe rapidly, as if on the point of death. She felt a surge of adrenaline and remorse.

“I grabbed him off of the bed and put him on the floor and I was crying and calling ‘Jude, Jude, Jude,’ ” she said. “I started to attempt to do CPR on the floor.”

Justice Solomon cut off the testimony before she could answer a question from her lawyer about why she had had a change of heart. Her testimony is to resume Friday.

Jude had been given a diagnosis of autism at 18 months. But Ms. Jordan testified she did not believe the diagnosis. For years, she took him to a series of specialists who treated him for autoimmune disorders with massive doses of steroid, chemotherapy and blood-filtering procedures.

In 2008, she said, she became convinced that he had been sexually abused by his biological father and a babysitter. She said the boy first informed her of the abuse in late 2007 with a few simple words and gestures.

Ms. Jordan testified on Thursday that her son learned to communicate with her in March 2008 by typing notes on a laptop computer. Later, she said, he used BlackBerry cellphones to speak with her. Both of them wrote dialogue in a notepad program, she said.

Prosecutors are expected to raise questions about whether an 8-year-old who spoke few words and had symptoms of severe autism could compose the messages. Earlier in the trial, a teacher at Jude’s last school testified for the prosecution that Ms. Jordan always helped him write the messages, holding his hand above the keyboard.

But Ms. Jordan insisted on the stand that her son communicated with her daily. “It’s me writing to Jude and Jude writing to me,” she said.

Ms. Jordan said Jude had described the sexual abuse by his father in these notes. The defense introduced a copy of one conversation, purporting to be from March 2008, in which Jude expressed a desire to die because of the abuse, according to his mother. “I feel so bad I want to be done with life,” Ms. Jordan said her son wrote.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Woman Testifies She Tried to Revive Her Dying Son. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe